On arrival in Hispaniola, Méndez was to move on to Santo Domingo, the tiny capital, to beseech Ovando for help, and Fieschi was to return to Jamaica forthwith “to spare us worry that and fear that he might have perished.” As Ferdinand knew, “this could easily happen with such flimsy craft if the sea turned at all rough.” In fact, they were setting off on a journey of great hardship.
The two canoes proceeded eastward along the coast, the Indians diligently paddling, encountering “only little islands or rocks along the whole course.” The final leg from that island to Hispaniola, eight leagues of open water, proved to be the most uncertain. “They had to wait for a perfect calm before starting to cross that great space in such frail craft.” As if by divine will, the sea turned to glass for them.
After the rescue mission had departed, those left behind languished in their improvised fortresses in Jamaica. In the enforced idleness, morale deteriorated at an alarming rate; the men, barely loyal to Columbus at the voyage’s outset, complained and conspired. They wove elaborate theories about their enigmatic, unstable Admiral, designed to prove that he had no intention of returning to Hispaniola, where he had been forbidden to land. In this scenario, Méndez and Fieschi would return to Spain and secure Columbus’s fortune with the Sovereigns. To fit this theory, they persuaded themselves that Columbus was content to remain “in exile right there,” on a splendid broad beach with Indians doing his bidding until matters at home were settled to his liking.
The empty days passed. Where was Fieschi? He should have returned by this time. What if he had perished at sea? What if Méndez had perished? What if Fieschi and Méndez had both perished? Dependent for the moment on the Indians for survival, the forgotten castaways on Jamaica lost all hope of rescue.
Sequestered on his wrecked ship, an apt symbol of his mind and body, the Admiral afforded the men scant confidence. He could hardly get out of bed, much less endure the hardships of a canoe voyage to Hispaniola. He was broken in body, and damaged in spirit, preparing to make his final voyage, from which there would be no return. He had demonstrated that the world was a more varied and richer place than any in Christendom had suspected, but now he confronted the limits of mortality.
In July, he composed an epistle to the Sovereigns laying bare his regret, self-pity, and recrimination. “I cannot recall Hispaniola, Paria, and the other lands without crying,” he wrote of his miscarried adventures. “I used to believe that their example could serve for these others; on the contrary, they are in a depressed state: though they are not dying, their illness is incurable and prolonged. Let them who reduced them to this state come forward with the remedy, if he can or knows how. Everyone is a master at destruction,” except himself, of course. “Those who left the Indies, shirking work and speaking of the Indies and me, later returned with appointments; the same will now happen with Veragua.” He had seen it all coming, and had tried to govern “in your royal name. You accepted that,” he forcefully reminded them at this great distance, “granting it with privileges and by agreement, with seal and oath; you named me Viceroy, Admiral, and Governor General of all, and you assigned me a boundary 100 leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, with a line running from pole to pole, and over all that I might discover later you gave me full powers.”
Now they, or those around them, were stripping him of those powers, despite his accomplishments. “Seven years ago I was at your royal court,” he said, at a time when “all who heard of this undertaking agreed it was foolishness.” He had given them new lands, new riches, and a new world. But they had rewarded him by ending his monopoly, creating an absurd state of affairs. “Now even tailors want to make discoveries,” he groused. “One is led to believe they go to make clothes; they are given permission and make a profit, greatly prejudicing my honor and severely damaging the economy.” Columbus believed he deserved to be treated more respectfully, and generously, than a merchant. The lands he discovered “are vaster and richer than any other in Christendom,” and he had been the one who placed them “under your royal and eminent rule, and in a position to render tremendous profits.” On the beach at Jamaica, he relived the trauma of his confinement for the benefit of the Sovereigns, for whom he had arranged to receive “tremendous profits” from ships that were “victorious and with great news of gold,” while he, their Admiral, “full of faith and joy,” was suddenly, without warning, “arrested, and thrown in a ship with two of my brothers, brought in irons, naked and mistreated”—here he was stretching a point, for he had insisted in keeping the chains when his captors wished to remove them—“without being summoned or charged by the law.”
He gave vent to the roaring in his head:Who would believe that a poor foreigner could rebel under such circumstances against Your Highnesses without cause or the aid of another prince, alone in the world, surrounded by your vassals and subjects and having my sons at your royal court? I came to serve at the age of 28, and now I have not a single hair left that is not white, and my body is infirm and broken; all that belonged to me was taken and sold—and from my brothers, even their clothes—without my being heard or received, to my great dishonor. One has to trust that these things were not done by your royal order.
They could redeem themselves, Columbus told his Sovereigns, by punishing “those who did this and stole my pearls”—a blatant reference to the turncoat Alonso de Ojeda, who poached on the pearl fisheries that Columbus had discovered off the coast of Venezuela. If the Sovereigns put matters right, “the greatest virtue and exemplary fame would redound” to them. Descending into melodrama, he confided, “I am desperate.”
I used to weep for others; now may heaven show me mercy, and the earth weep for me. As for temporal things, I do not possess even a penny to give to charity; as for spirituality, I have been stranded here in the Indies . . . isolated in this torment, sick, expecting death every day and encircled by a million savages—filled with cruelty, our enemies—so far from the holy sacraments and Holy Church that she would forget this soul if it were separated from the body here. May whoever possesses charity, truth, and justice weep for me. I did not set out on this voyage to earn honors and riches; that is certain because hope of that is already dead. I came to Your Highnesses with an honest intention and good zeal, and I am not lying. Humbly I beseech Your Highnesses, if God be pleased to release me from here, to permit me to go to Rome and other places of pilgrimage. May the most Holy Trinity preserve and increase your life and high state.
—Written in the Indies on the island of Jamaica, July 7, 1503.
CHAPTER 13
February 29, 1504
Columbus fretted and hallucinated about his shattered career in the privacy of his quarters. The other men stranded on Jamaica, no less isolated and desperate, tormented themselves by imagining the favored few who had departed in canoes arriving to a royal welcome in Spain, where they would “enjoy the favor of Bishop Juan de Fonseca and the High Treasurer of Castile,” Ferdinand commented.
At this moment of maximum vulnerability, two of the castaways, Francisco Porras and his brother Diego, decided they could no longer endure Columbus’s infirmity and tyranny. Lives were at risk, and something had to be done as quickly as possible. They were an influential pair of traitors—one was Santiago’s captain, the other comptroller of the fleet—and together they cajoled forty-eight men to affix their signatures to the articles of mutiny. The uprising was scheduled to commence on the morning of January 2, 1504.
Captain Francisco Porras burst into Columbus’s makeshift cabin, demanding, “What do you mean by making no effort to get to Castile? Do you wish to keep us here to perish?”
As calmly as possible the Admiral said that no one wished to leave the island more than he did, but they needed a ship. If Porras had another plan, he should propose it to the other captains to consider; Columbus would convene them as often as needed. Talk of meetings merely annoyed Porras. Either Columbus decided to leave the island immediately, or the others would abandon him. He turned his back on
the Admiral, a sign of profound disrespect, and shouted, “I’m for Castile. Who’s with me?”
The other mutineers cried out, “We’re with you!”
At that, they overran the makeshift cabins and roundtops, or masthead platforms, aboard the two shipwrecks, bellowing “Death to them!” and “To Castile! To Castile!”
A few loyalists, their voices drowned by the madmen, inquired, “Captain, what do we do now?”
Crippled by arthritis, Columbus was barely able to stand. Ferdinand reported that he “hobbled to the scene of the mutiny; but three or four honest fellows, his servants, fearing the mutineers might slay him, forced him with great difficulty to return to bed.”
With Columbus safe for the moment, the loyalists rushed to his brother the Adelantado, who was fighting off attackers with a lance. The loyalists relieved him of the weapon, and shut him in the cabin with Columbus. Then they pleaded with Porras to leave before he inspired a “murder which was bound to harm them all and for which he would certainly be punished.” If Porras complied, “none would seek to hinder him from going.”
As negotiations concluded, the mutiny lost some of its vehemence. Columbus had “scoured the islands to procure canoes” to prevent the Indians from using them. Porras and his men commandeered the canoes, and “they set out in them as gaily as if they were embarking from a harbor in Castile.” As they began to pull away, many others, “not mutineers but . . . desperate at the thought of being abandoned there by the greatest and healthiest part of the company also piled into the canoes”—much to the distress of the few remaining loyalists and of the sick, who with good reason believed they were “doomed to remain there.” The humiliating sight of nearly all of the men abandoning the Admiral who had brought them on this adventure remained with Ferdinand, who sadly noted, “If all had been in good health, I doubt that twenty of those people would have stayed with the Admiral.” Their morale lower than ever, those who stayed behind beheld the Admiral emerge unsteadily from his cabin to comfort and reassure his men as best he could. In fact, there was little consolation he could offer while Francisco Porras led the canoes laden with deserters to the same location on Jamaica’s easternmost shore from which Méndez and Fieschi had set out on their rescue mission.
Ferdinand painted an ugly picture of the deserters preparing to depart for Hispaniola: “Wherever they called, they inflicted outrages on the Indians, robbing their food and other possessions; they told the Indians to collect their pay from the Admiral and authorized them to kill him if he would not pay.” To feed the Indians’ disdain, Porras’s renegades explained that all the other Christians hated Columbus, that Columbus was the author of “all the misery of the Indians on Hispaniola,” and, if they failed to kill Columbus, he would “inflict the same suffering on them.”
Setting out from the Jamaican coast, they made uncertain progress toward their goal. After they had traversed four leagues, “the wind turned contrary,” and the men feared the rolling seas would swamp their overloaded craft. Before long, water was coming over the gunwales, and they resorted to tossing everything overboard, with the exception of their weapons and food for the return journey to the Jamaican coast from which they had departed. When the wind gained in strength, terrifying the renegades, they decided their only course of action was to kill the Indians and toss them overboard, as if they were excess supplies. Once they started killing Indians, the others jumped overboard, swimming away from the canoes until fatigue overcame them. In desperation, they returned to the canoes, holding on to the gunwales in a death grip, until the mutineers hacked off their hands.
Ferdinand acidly commented on the “Christians’” behavior: “They killed eighteen this way, sparing only a few needed to steer the canoes; this was the Indians’ reward for listening to their false promises and their pleas for aid.”
The renegades returned to the marshy Jamaican shore, where they fell to arguing about what to do next. Some of the men aimed to flee to Cuba, thinking “the easterly currents and winds” would carry them to their destination; once in Cuba, they assumed it would be an “easy jump” to Hispaniola, without realizing that many miles separated the two islands. (Ferdinand recognized that Cuba was an island, even if his father clung to the belief that it was a promontory extending eastward from the “Indian” mainland.) Other renegades wanted to return to the relative safety of the wrecked ships they had recently abandoned. They could either make peace with the Admiral or attempt to confiscate his weapons. A third group advocated waiting to try for better weather and attempt to reach Hispaniola again, and eventually they prevailed.
The desperate rebels passed more than a month in a Jamaican village Ferdinand called Aomaquique, relied on the Indians for sustenance, and waited for a favorable wind. When they judged conditions were right, they tried again, failed again, and tried yet once more, defeated each time by contrary winds. Broken in spirit, they trudged back to the harbor where their ships and the remnants of the crew remained, living off the land and, when they could, stealing food from the Indians. The glorious voyage had come to this, a band of scavengers and robbers, unable to save their own skins, or souls, or those of anyone else.
In charge of the ruins of two beached ships, Columbus, though enfeebled, tended to the sick among his loyal men. At the same time, he made certain to give the Indians the respect needed to do business. The ailing loyalists, many of them, regained their strength, and the Indians continued to serve, until the system broke down under unequal requirements. “They are an indolent people who will not cultivate on a large scale,” Ferdinand wrote in a cruelly revealing passage, “and we consumed more in a day than they in twenty.”
Worse, as the Indians acquired goods from the Europeans in barter transactions, they “began to be influenced by the arguments of the mutineers” and brought fewer provisions to the visitors. As January 1504 gave way to February, the situation steadily deteriorated. The loyalists were faced with a dilemma: if they abandoned their makeshift dwellings to attack the Indians for more of the cassava, fruit, and water on which their lives depended, they would be “leaving the Admiral to face great danger in the ships.” The Europeans came to realize that the Indians, by starving the intruders by degrees, “believed they had us at their mercy.”
In all honesty, Ferdinand confessed, “we did not know what to do.”
Throughout his years of exploring, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Columbus had revealed a genius for survival, whether shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal, pleading for support from the Sovereigns, fending off mutineers, or trying to reclaim his legacy from rivals. Now, with no ships at his disposal, Indians slowly starving him, his men reduced to a paltry few, and his health so poor that he could barely stand, he faced his greatest challenge, and to meet it, he devised a supreme ruse in which he virtually became the sorcerer that others had feared he always was. They held that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea could command the tides and even the weather; now, in the name of survival, he plotted to demonstrate that he controlled the heavens themselves.
Columbus’s hidden advantage had always been his sophisticated knowledge of navigation. Turning to his store of charts and books, he studied the Almanach perpetuum, compiled in 1496 by Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, the Sephardic Jewish astronomer and mathematician who had served João II after the Inquisition drove him from Spain. Portuguese captains often consulted this work, consisting of hundreds of pages of astronomical tables accurately predicting celestial phenomena. Columbus may also have relied on Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides astronomicae (1474), which conveniently enough included a table of lunar eclipses occurring between 1475 and 1540. In the past, he had relied on these reference works to calculate latitude and longitude, often with mixed results, and now he turned to them to save his life.
According to Regiomontanus, an auspicious event would occur on February 29, 1504: a lunar eclipse. In this eerie celestial spectacle, the moon passes through the earth’s umbral—or inner—shadow, turning ever deeper shades of orange, an
d eventually bloodred, before returning to normal. The sight was enough to spark foreboding in superstitious sailors and, Columbus hoped, in credulous Indians.
Regiomontanus included the dates of the eclipses, and diagrams of how completely the moon would dim, hour by hour. But the times of the occurrence differed across the globe, and Columbus could not reliably determine the local time in Jamaica. (Regiomontanus’s calculations applied to Nuremberg, Germany.) And he could not say how accurate Regiomontanus’s prediction for February 29, 1504, might be. He had no choice but to take his chances according to his best estimates. If he succeeded, he would demonstrate supernatural power to the Indians that would deeply influence their behavior. If he failed, he and his men would likely succumb to starvation or slaughter at the hands of the Indians.
He summoned the caciques of the region to a feast. Ferdinand recorded, “He told the gathering through an interpreter that we were Christians and believed in God, who . . . rewarded the good and punished the wicked, as he had punished the mutineers by not permitting them to cross over to Hispaniola, as Méndez and Fieschi had done, and by causing them to suffer many trials and dangers, as the Indians well knew.” Columbus warned the Indians that “God was very angry with them for neglecting to bring us food for which we had paid them by barter, and had determined to punish them with famine and pestilence.”
As the audience absorbed the import of the old Admiral’s words, laughter broke out, at first hesitant, then boldly derisive. He told the doubters, “God would send them a clear token from Heaven of the punishment they were about to receive. They should therefore attend that night the rising of the moon: She would arise inflamed with wrath, signifying the chastisement God would visit upon them.” He stopped, rested, and observed as “the Indians departed, some frightened and others scoffing at his threats.”
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